16 of the most useful cloud management tools

One of the biggest concerns users have with public cloud resources is not knowing how much they will cost, given the pay-as-you-go model.

"IT shops are becoming cost centers for service delivery," says William Fellows, a researcher at the 451 Group. "But they're looking for ways to determine how their clouds are running, how much it's costing and whether it's a good value."

Vendors provide some services around tracking usage. Amazon Web Services, for example, last week announced more granular data, allowing users to track their services hour by hour.

But there is a growing ecosystem of cloud management tools. Some help companies manage, track and optimize their use of public or private cloud resources. Others help companies automate and deploy cloud resources. And others act as a platform for managing public cloud resources.

Below is a list of 16 cloud management tools, broken up by category: cost tracking, automation and provisioning, and cloud management platform. This is not intended to be an all-inclusive list, but rather an overview of some of the players.

Cost tracking

Cloudability: Provides cost usage metrics, as well as predictions of how much of certain resources users are consuming and which ones are under-utilized. The company's application programing interface (API) allows users to import metrics into various other tools for storage and analysis. Cloudability works across multiple public cloud providers as well.

Cloudyn: Israeli-based Cloudyn provides tracking of cloud resources and recommendations of how to optimize cloud usage. It offers a free reserved instance calculator, which helps customers calculate costs related to reserving virtual machines in AWS's public cloud, and has a premium enterprise version that will provide recommendations of which cloud resources to use and alerts of underutilized cloud resources. The company claims that it helps customers avoid an average of 40% of their costs by optimizing their cloud usage. Cloudyn recently announced a partnership with Scalr to help customers automate the provisioning of cloud resources based on recommendations from Cloudyn's analysis tools.

Cloud Cruiser: Venture-backed Cloud Cruiser provides cost tracking and optimization analysis across a variety of IT platforms, from on-premise systems to colocation to private and public clouds. The Cloud Cruiser system allows users to measure usage and allocate costs, creating a chargeback billing model within an IT organization. The company was founded in 2010 by Dave Zabrowski, a former HP enterprise division vice president and general manager.

Newvem: Israeli startup Newvem has focused its efforts entirely on Amazon Web Services and providing cloud metrics and optimization recommendations. Newvem Analytics software collects data from customers' use of AWS resources and provides metrics of usage patterns, as well as recommendations of more efficient resource allocation based on past use. Newvem recently launched a partnership with Datapipe, which is a provider of cloud and managed hosting services that also customizes cloud deployments for users, acting as a "gateway" to public cloud vendors, including Amazon Web Services.

Chef: An open source systems integration framework that includes a library of configuration management tools. Developed by venture-backed Opscode, it integrates with existing applications, including various databases and LDAP directories, and allows for the discovering and provisioning of public or private resources. It has "cookbooks" which include "recipes" for launching OpenStack private cloud instances and AWS public cloud resources, for instance, and it also works across VMware and Rackspace environments, among others.

Puppet Labs: Puppet Labs' software is meant to help users automate repetitive tasks, such as deploying applications and managing infrastructure. Within the Puppet Enterprise software, users can discover resources, provision them, configure and manage operating systems and applications, and update patches across public or private clouds. A trial version of the software allows users to manage up to 10 nodes for free.

RightScale: Founded in 2006, RightScale is a platform for managing and deploying cloud resources across public and private environments, providing users tools to configure, monitor, automate deployments, and govern controls and access. It works across a variety of public and private platforms including Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Software, Microsoft Azure, Datepipe and private cloud platforms including CloudStack, Eucalyptus and OpenStack.

GigaSpaces Technologies: GigaSpaces is a platform for automating application deployment to a variety of environments, including public and private clouds, as well as physical hardware. The company's newest product is Cloudify, which it markets as a private platform as a service (PaaS) for deploying applications to public cloud environments without requiring changes to the code. It uses a relationship the company just inked with Chef to automate these tasks.

BMC: Fresh off news of a partnership with Amazon Web Services that certifies BMC as a manager of AWS cloud resources, BMC seems armed with ammunition to take to the enterprise market by being able to enable management of various private cloud platforms and AWS's public cloud.

CA Technologies: CA Technologies cloud management tools, including CA AppLogic, allow users to deploy and scale existing applications across public and private cloud environments with build in monitoring features using a graphic user interface (GUI) that requires no changes to the application's code. CA has recently enhances its support to deploy management of AWS workloads too.

Hewlett-Packard: HP has been making a lot of announcements recently about its Converged Cloud Strategy, which it says is a common platform across public and private clouds for users. Based on OpenStack code, the idea is to manage private clouds build on HP servers and have the ability to scale up into HP's recently launched public cloud, all with the same platform. The company has emphasized its support for multiple types of hypervisors on the private cloud side, but has not talked as much about enabling workloads across multiple public cloud providers though.

IBM: IBM SmartCloud is the omnibus suite of services that provide a range of features, from monitoring the health and status of cloud resources, while also allowing automated connections to compute and storage resources from IBM or other vendors.

ServiceMesh: ServiceMesh manages public, private and hybrid clouds across a common platform, but allowing separate policies for different environments based on access controls and auditing. It charters on a per-virtual machine basis.

VMware IT Business Management Suite: Optimized for VMware environments, the company's ITBM provides usage metrics for centralized management of a private cloud, allowing CIOs to become "IT service brokers," the company says. ITBM allows users to set alerts based on cost and service level, and it allows granular information about past, present and predicted future use by individuals and departments as well.

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